This is my first time running a long, open-ended campaign. Obviously, it’s not totally open-ended, but there isn’t a set narrative or pace, and the layout of the book is very much a sandbox: here are the places your party might go, in any order. Here are some things that will get triggered if they do certain other things. Eventually, they’ll fight Strahd and they might die trying.
I’ve run some long-ish campaigns—in the realm of a couple months of play—but they’ve always been fairly tightly focused in terms of story. I’ve known what the antagonists are doing in the background, and while the players might slow or accelerate events, I had a general sense of when things would happen and when to push the story to the next stage because the antagonists had a clear agenda and I knew roughly how long I wanted the campaign to last.
I think one of the core difficulties of Curse of Strahd is that the titular antagonist has to behave a little irrationally. It’s very possible to force the events of the campaign to happen extremely quickly, have Strahd constantly bearing down on the characters, and it could be pretty cool to run the game that way—but I don’t think first-time players would enjoy it very much, and you’d probably end up skipping or otherwise rushing through a lot of the iconic elements of the game. Strahd is established as toying with adventurers, testing them, not defeating them even though he easily could.
This is pretty obviously a choice from narrative necessity, not just characterisation. And because Strahd does choose to intervene at various points, it’s even harder to decide when to have him do so, and why, because the underlying logic for his passivity isn’t something in-world, it’s ‘give the adventurers enough space to level up and wander around.’
One answer to this is to really delve into Strahd as a character, and to try to set his motivations in my own mind very clearly… but I don’t really like having things that concretely set in the background. For my own DMing (and player!) tastes, I prefer a bit of Shrödinger’s worldbuilding: nothing is totally concrete until the players encounter it, and I particularly like that to be true of antagonists. They may have goals, but especially for someone like Strahd, who needs to be both scary and thematically resonant for the PCs, I want their actions and encounters with him to shape who he is to some extent.
So far, Strahd knows that the players are traveling with Ezmeralda and (as of today) Kasimir, both of whom he wants to find and kill, and he knows that (as is true in our setting) they are traveling not only with the reincarnation of Tatyana, but with several other reborn versions of great enemies from his past… plus one other reincarnated soul whose identity he hasn’t worked out yet, but will probably take very decisive action when he does. I think he’s beginning to formulate a plan not to kill them, thus releasing their souls to continue pestering him, but to turn them all into vampire spawn: reborn-Tatyana as his bride, and the rest to use as his puppets for eternity.
I’d been getting really in my head about how time Strahd’s reactions, and had a whole draft of this post half-written about different strategies I was going to use to try and experiment with pacing or how to help myself think through Strahd’s tricky and flexible motivations.
Then the game happened.
I was asked once how I manage pacing, and I answered very honestly that I don’t. I think that pacing is important on a TTRPG on a certain level—you want fast parts and slow parts, and a variety of types of scene within a session—but pacing the narrative itself is sort of futile. If you try to control the pace of events, you’re either going to end up holding back information or events that the players have earned or naturally caused, or forcing things to happen out of the blue. Strahd’s motivations felt different to me because they did seem so nebulous, and it felt like the choice of when things like his dinner invitation happened were totally up to me… but of course they aren’t. I was just getting nervous. I just needed to trust the process.
So anyway, one of the PCs got lured solo to Strahd’s castle. So I guess events are accelerating.